English

Sweet homecoming for trafficking survivor after 17 years

Rajendra Prasad Paneru/ Kanchanpur, April 4 (RSS): Never had 32-year-old Tara Kami of local Sisaiya, Shuklaphanta Municipality-9 who had been trafficked to and sold in India thought that she would ever get back home.
Tara was kidnapped from the market at Jhalari bazaar when she had gone there for shopping. She was 15 years then. Some unscrupulous people abducted her by giving her drink laced with sedatives and took her to India. All this happened to her 17 years ago.

“They used to lock me up in a room and forcibly give me injections of sedatives. Whenever I regained consciousness, they would again give the sedative injection. You would not know where you are being taken in such condition,” Tara narrated her ordeals.

She said weeping, “They would take money from people who used to come in cars by one hand and with the other hand gave my hand to and forced me to go with these people. I was sold like this at four or five places.”
According to her, she lived a hellish life for one and half years. She wept most of the time but nobody would listen to her.
“Sometimes my mind does not work at all due to the effect of the sedative injections. I don’t realise what I am talking and where I am going,” she explains her condition.
Tara is now married with Jas Karan Singh of Gunla Tehsil, Kaithal District, Haryana in India. She got into Singh’s hands trafficked and sold from Punjab province of India. They have a 15-year-old son.

She said she only remembered the name Sisaiya Jhalari and her son did a Google search of this place. And, here they are. She said the Nepalis working in India also supported her to come to Nepal.

“I had not thought even in my dreams that I would come here, meet my parents and family members. I got to meet all people through my son’s initiatives,” Tara said with tear-filled eyes.

She emphasised, sobbing, “Those people who trafficked me to India should be hanged. I had to endure all this torture and agony. Other women like me should not.”

Tara does not remember the people who offered her the drink laced with sedative and whisked her to India.
“I am happy now after marrying with Singh. I have come to my parental home, my birthplace, with the agreement from my family and people in my village in India.

According to her, there are many Nepali women who met her fate and who have now married Indian men in Uttarakhand of India where she currently lives. She said many men in her village in India ‘buy’ women and marry with them. “The rich people in the village buy their wives whereas if one is poor, he cannot marry,” she said.

“We had lost hope of finding our daughter. We thought she is no more,” said Birma Kami, Tara’s mother. “I could not hold back tears, when Tara came to meet us all of a sudden. It was like god-send,” she said with exuberance.

Birma Kami has demanded that the government should book the people involved in women trafficking. “Many girls have disappeared from our village and their whereabouts have to be found out. They should be rescued and rehabilitated.

According to the Sisaiya locals, more than six girls from their village alone had gone missing and of them only three have returned home escaping from the clutches of the women traffickers.